'The Wild Duck' spectacularly visual but hindered by uneven power

January 26, 2009|By Chris Jones, Tribune critic

The soaring stagehouse of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art has become a spatial playpen for Charles Newell, the restlessly intelligent artistic director of the Court Theatre, and Leigh Breslau, a Chicago architect by trade who insists in his biographies that he is not a set designer, but he is actually a very gifted one.

When this trio -- director, architect, building -- did Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" in 2007, the result was a thrilling meditation on place and relationship. Breslau doesn't truck with faux or flimsy settings -- he builds solid rooms, metallic catwalks, doors and walls thick with substance. He approaches scenic design from the perspective of the architect, and that's why his designs stimulate as your eye roves over every inch of their meaty dimensions. Sign him up for the Lyric Opera, I say.

For the now, the triumvirate is back for Court's production of Henrik Ibsen's "The Wild Duck," the 1884 play by the Norwegian symbolist/naturalist that deals with two interwoven families of different classes, a son trying to assuage the sexual sins of the father and the discovery of a horrible marital secret. As to overarching theme, one particular quote from the fresh and unfussy new Richard Nelson translation says it very nicely: "When you take away a man's delusions, you take away his happiness."

For much of the first act, this visually spectacular show conveys great excitement. Newell establishes from the top that this is not your father's Ibsen. Yet the opening father-and-son scene between the prodigiously talented Jay Whittaker (who plays Gregers Werle) and John Reeger (as the elder Werle) crackles with tense emotion.

And as soon as the action shifts to the photographic studio in which the ill-fated Ekdal family reside -- re-created by Breslau on a massive industrial scale with eye-popping verticals -- we're treated to another of those Newell-Breslau tableaux of human beings rushing through exaggerated space on a variety of fraught personal journeys.

You watch the characters go about their physical business -- and this production is full of physical business -- like helpless rats careening to mutually assured destruction. For the first hour or so, it's all exceptionally provocative. And legitimately Ibsenian.

But as the show winds on, you come to see that the actors are not well integrated into this vision. Cracks between individuals start to emerge; strange casting choices begin to cast a pall; and, most problematic of all, the power structure seems out of whack.

The fundamental problem with the production is that the central premises of Gregers Werle unwinding the lives of the vulnerable Ekdal family doesn't work because you can't believe that he would have the power to do so. In this show, they'd smack him down and carry on with their illusions.

That's because Whittaker, a fine actor, forges a neurotic, internalized Gregers whom Kevin Gudahl's robust Hialmar Ekdal (who looks a little too old to have been Gregers' classmate) could eat for breakfast. As wife Gina Ekdal, Mary Beth Fisher makes the choice to play a sardonic woman of high intelligence, mostly disconnected from these excitable boys. It's a typically thorough and impressive characterization but adds to the effect of the most powerful actors playing most impressionable roles and not unlocking all their potential vulnerabilities. Only Reeger really captures the pivotal blend of authority and personal fear.

At the end of the play, when everyone is running after Laura Scheinbaum's feral, peripatetic Hedwig, who scurries upstairs once too often for us to care, we don't sense that anyone here has ever really needed anyone else. And that collapses the play inside its provocative arena.

It is far from an uninteresting or an unworthy fall -- on the contrary, this is a very arresting piece of large-scale theater that flows from fervent creative minds -- but it's still a show that misses the most pivotal human connections.